This invention relates to card games, specifically to the subject of time travel as it is depicted and simulated in the context of parlor games played with specially-designed playing cards.
Time travel, while not actually possible, is a rich and exciting concept that has frequently been depicted in popular narrative forms. Everyone dreams of somehow traveling back in time to undo past mistakes. However, while the idea is commonly used in such media as stories, movies, and videogames, time travel has rarely been explored by traditional parlor games (setting aside role-playing games). Because of the complexity and difficulty of simulating the paradoxes and alternate realities that would result from the changing of history, if such a thing were actually possible, only a handful of time-travel-themed board games have ever been released, and prior to the invention of this method, no time travel card game has been published.
In 1992, TimJim/Prism Games released xe2x80x9cTime Agentxe2x80x9d, a board game which allows players to manipulate the past using a board made up of hex-shaped tiles. However, the system of connecting pathways on these tiles was complex and unintuitive, employing square chits as well as tiles, tokens, and a gameboard. Moreover, the events one could change were vague and abstract, taking place on a galactic scale, with unclear relationships and causalities. One doesn""t really get the sense of using time travel to change the past from playing this game. Just as ineffective is xe2x80x9cTime Warxe2x80x9d, published in 1979, which employed chits on a board made up of concentric rings, with the innermost ring being the furthest back in time; here again, the player""s ability to alter history was almost entirely abstract. The game had more to do with competing efforts to fund and build time travel devices than with the relationships between past and future events. Finally, there is xe2x80x9cTime Piratesxe2x80x9d, published in 2000, a board game in which time travel is just window dressing. The gameplay is simply a treasure hunt across history, with no provision at all for players to change events of the past. All of these games are large, equipment intensive board games.
The invention described below is embodied in a new card game entitled xe2x80x9cChrononautsxe2x80x9d, which was published by Looney Labs in October 2000. The action of xe2x80x9cChrononautsxe2x80x9d takes place over a span of more than a century and focuses on a series of major historical events spread out over a 32 card grid. However, for the purposes of explaining the underlying method it employs, a simple 5 card Timeline from an imaginary game will be presented here.
This invention provides the basis for a game about time travel, by first establishing a xe2x80x9chistoryxe2x80x9d on a sequence of playing cards, collectively referred to as the Timeline, then noting xe2x80x9cchangesxe2x80x9d to this history with changes to the placement of these cards and/or the placement of additional cards. Icons on the cards show the causality between specific events in the past and others in the future, so that when history is altered in the past, the impact of such changes on future events can be seen and properly responded to, by turning over additional cards or placing new cards atop them.